SOLD: Beautiful Happyzine

By Charlotte Squire

I’d found it, the house we were going to begin our family in.  It was just as I’d visualised six months earlier – surrounded in well established trees, close to the beach, and fenced in for the dog – a Golden Retriever to be precise – we were going to buy.  Soon, I would discover it also came with the world’s most amazing, generous, loyal neighbours, a nice big bath, a homely fireplace, and gorgeous wooden floors.  I was seven months pregnant with our first child and as soon as I saw ‘our house’ I called the property manager and let her know we had to have it!  Two weeks later we moved in.

From the moment we arrived in Christchurch so my partner could begin his new job, it took me four days to find that house.  I knew what I wanted, and it came fast!  During the 15 months we lived in that villa in New Brighton, Christchurch, it was our sanctuary, just as I’d imagined it would be all those months ago when we first discovered I was pregnant.  It was also in that house that my good news website Happyzine was born as I day dreamed in the sunshine, whilst breastfeeding our most amazing son.

I’d drawn that house many months before I saw it.

As soon as I found out out was pregnant I lay on our bed in an old house-bus in a tiny rural community in Golden Bay and drew pictures of our wonderful, nourishing future – where all our needs were abundantly met and love prevailed.  These weren’t works of art, just simple sketches of the life I wanted for my family, and they did the trick!  I stuck them together on our wall and every morning and night I’d imagine us living the lives I’d drawn.

These weren’t naive acts of faith.  Author of The Winner’s Bible Dr. Kerry Spackman, who has helped Olympic champions, world champions and business people create success in all aspects of their lives, would say there were several reasons I succeeded in creating that life.

Spackman rates ‘consistency’, saying it’s crucial to go there daily because your brain needs to “know any new process is going to be a permanent and regular feature of your life before it’s going to bother changing its wiring.”

He also says it’s important to keep the process interesting and relaxed, only focusing on a few goals per day and giving them your intense concentration so that the dreams stay fresh and inspiring.  And he says it’s important to go there emotionally.

And here we are at the crucial factor.  To be able to completely feel the dream, just as you imagine it will feel as you’re living it, and enjoy it, is in my opinion a deeply powerful and significant exercise.

Visualisation needs to be more than an intellectual experience, you need to be able to connect with the subject of your images deeply in your heart.  The more you’re able to connect emotionally, and spend time luxuriating in the feeling of living your dream, the better.

If you can’t honestly feel it, that’s probably whey it’s not in your life just yet.  This can be a great opportunity to find out why you can’t yet identify with the feeling.

The brilliant thing about this visualisation and vision board business is you can use these techniques to create good for others too, and for community you live in and for the planet.  To focus your attention on generating positive outcomes for others and for nature feels just as wonderful as it does to do the same for yourself.  And some say it brings just as much good.

Environmental issues can often become very loaded emotionally, but investing in any form of negative emotional is never useful, and only lead to more of the same.  I love getting creative and imagining the most positive outcomes I can dream up for everyone involved as I seek to see positive solutions to tough environmental challenges eventuate.  Trust me, if you can remain positive, calm, flexible and patient as you apply your magnificent powers of visualization to improving an environmental issue, nothing but good will come from it.  Life will prove this in all manner of ways.

The key thing is finding the feeling, and the kinder you are to yourself, the more relaxed and trusting you can be with life, the easier it is to reach those wondrous feelings.  So here’s to trusting in the moment and allowing in all that goodness just waiting in the fringes, ready to spill into your life!

Charlotte Squire is the founder of the New Zealand positive news website www.happyzine.co.nz  She lives with her husband, her son, her mother, her dog, her cat and her mother’s canary in an old house in Golden Bay, New Zealand.  She’s offering the online course: Month of Change: Spring 2013 this November to the optimists of this world as they seek to being even more positive change into their lives, their communities and their planet!  Visualization techniques will be included.

Tags: Blog, positive thinking